The Irish Cottage Murder (20 page)

Off went Mr. Coffey on his red motorbike. Kevin got the tarps from the storeroom. They were heavy canvas, a dingy gray. He was covering one of the bales of hay when he heard a footfall behind him.

“Good morning, Kevin.”

He looked around, surprised. It was Ms. Tunet, the American woman. He was astonished that she knew his name. He felt flattered. She was wearing an old mackintosh, too big; the shoulders drooped. It was likely one of those from the back hall, the buttons missing, so it hung open. Beneath it, she had on dark brown corduroy jeans and a tan shirt, and a worn-looking, red webbed belt. Her short dark hair was covered by a bandanna, orange, with a blue design. She had tied it under her chin. She looked like any farm-working pretty colleen from back in Kerry.

She was smiling at him. “I saw you exercising Darlin’ Pie yesterday, Kevin. I envy the way you ride. I do it so badly.”

“Oh, no.” He blushed. But it was true. He was a natural, like part of the animal. As for her, she’d never be able to do it right. It made him feel gentle toward her.

“Is Mr. Coffey about?” Her voice was husky soft, like Mary Ellen’s in Kerry. He thought often about Mary Ellen.

“No, miss. He’s gone to Eamonn Flaherty’s, a harness place in Ballynagh.”

“Oh.” She bit a fingernail and looked about. “The stables are so big, aren’t they? Pretty, too. That U-shape around the stable yard. But, after all, they’re a castle’s stables.”

“Yes, miss.”

“What’re those two-story sections at the ends?”

“Mr. Coffey says they’re more recent built, miss. Upstairs quarters, they were, for a chauffeur and a gardener.”

“Well, it’s all lovely.” She was smiling at him again, a warm, friendly smile. “Doesn’t Mr. Coffey live in one of them?”

“Yes, miss.”

“The one nearer the castle, isn’t it?”

Kevin studied the canvas tarp that he’d forgotten he was still holding. “No, miss. The other one.”

“Well … I’m sorry I missed Mr. Coffey. Will he be back soon, Kevin?”

He gave a quick upward glance from the tarp. She had thrust her hands deep into the pockets of the big mackintosh; her eyes were bright and she had a high color. She was edgy as a filly in cold weather.

“Likely in an hour or so, miss.” He found he could not look her in the eye.

“I’ll be back later then. Thank you, Kevin.”

He did not turn to watch her go. He unfolded another tarp. Why was this American woman, Ms. Tunet, lying to him? An hour ago, crossing the stable yard, he’d glimpsed her, a still figure, watching the stables from the woods. It had been the flash of light on the binoculars that had caught his eye. He was famously keen-eyed, at least famous in Kerry for it.

So the American girl watching from the woods had seen Mr. Coffey zoom off on his motorbike, rackety-clack, out the stable yard and up the drive to the road.

She’d known Mr. Coffey wasn’t there. So why?

At a sudden thought, Kevin half-turned and looked toward the upstairs quarters where Brian Coffey lived.

*   *   *

Torrey came into a low-raftered room with two casement windows that overlooked the hills to the north. It was a bed-sitting room with a worn carpet and comfortable-looking old furniture. She glanced hastily through a doorway on the left and saw a kitchenette with a dusty counter and stove and a tin wastebasket filled with empty beer cans. Next to the kitchen was a pocket-sized bathroom with a soiled cotton bath mat, the color of rust. The shower curtain was the same unfortunate color.

She turned and looked quickly about. Between the casement windows was a dresser, on it a couple of framed family photographs, groups of smiling people, women with babies, and shock-headed little redheads in knee pants. Devlins, surely. The family-proud Devlins of Oughterard.
Maureen’s a whore.

She pulled open the top drawer and rummaged, searching. Socks, crumpled underpants, a half-pack of cigarettes, an unopened package of condoms. “‘Hope springs eternal,’” she whispered aloud, whimsically … and felt a momentary shame; everyone deserved his privacy.
But my life may depend on finding what I’m looking for.

She searched quickly through the next drawer … and the next. If she could only find it, it would be a start. There was always a trail; you had only to find the initial starting point. She felt herself growing hot with tension and anguish. Besides, the raftered room was stuffy, the casement windows closed against the damp morning air.

Feverishly, despairingly, she looked about. No other place in which Brian Coffey could hide anything. Only this dresser.

She pulled at the bottom drawer. It was not locked. There was no lock, but she couldn’t open it. She pulled harder and managed to inch it part way open. She saw then that the drawer was so full, its contents so heavy, that that had been the difficulty. With a strong, final pull, she had it open.

She gazed down at the jumbled contents. She picked up a steel watchband, so damaged that fixing it would be hopeless. She saw a Swiss army knife with a broken blade, a bent little picture frame with a cracked glass, a couple of tattered romance novels. There were bits of string, so short as to be unusable.

Torrey sat back on her heels. A pack rat! Brian Coffey was a pack rat. He was unable to discard anything, no matter how useless. She gazed at a broken, inch-long bit of pencil that rested on a girl’s brassiere, pink, faded. She lifted the brassiere and dangled it from one hand. Where it had lain, she saw a snapshot of a freckle-faced girl with flyaway hair. She dropped the brassiere and turned over the snapshot; the date on the back was eight years ago.

Hopeless. Useless to find among this old stuff what she was searching for. She stirred the contents of the drawer with an indifferent finger, and her eye was caught by a grubby envelope. She opened it. Inside was a single sheet, an official document: Brian Coffey, Oughterard, County Galway, six months’ probation, two years ago. Theft of a motor part. So a fellow thief! Brian Coffey had not been a model citizen. Had Desmond Moore known?

She put back the document. Beside it lay a toy pistol, hardly the size of her palm. Not likely real. Still, on the off chance that it was, she’d feel safer if it were kept out of Brian Coffey’s hands. She slipped it into her pocket.

Give up. Look somewhere else, not in this pack-rat drawer of old stuff. And hurry up.
Get out of here.

She shoved at the drawer to close it, but at that instant a small green envelope caught her eye. She looked at it in surprise. It contrasted oddly with the rest of the contents of the drawer, it was so clean and new looking. She pulled it out. She opened it. Two tickets to a horse auction in Cork. Her glance fell on the date of the auction. It was almost a week ago, Thursday, so the tickets had been unused.

Thursday. That Thursday, six days ago, was the day Desmond Moore had been murdered.

59

“Now, now, no cutting up,” Kevin said severely to Fast Forward, the chestnut mare. She was inclined to be skittish when he curried her. Kevin hardly had the words out when he heard the motorbike. Mr. Coffey returning.

Kevin stood still, holding the currycomb, one hand on Fast Forward’s haunch. Apprehension slowly made a tight feeling across his chest. Did the American girl, upstairs in Mr. Coffey’s quarters, hear the motorbike? He hoped so. Mr. Coffey was edgy lately, like ghosts in a closet were jumping out at him. Strange-acting, too. He sometimes disappeared into the woods for a half-hour or more. And he had sudden, ugly moods, where he had not had them before. He’d blown up yesterday, saying Kevin should’ve had the water buckets filled by noon, and here it was half after twelve. A bit frightening it was. It spoiled things for Kevin. He still admired Mr. Coffey for what he knew about horses, but he no longer liked to be near him.

In Fast Forward’s stall, Kevin began slowly to pull the currycomb through the mare’s tail, his head cocked, listening. He heard Mr. Coffey park the motorbike just inside the stable. Then Mr. Coffey came walking past the horse stalls. He stalked past Fast Forward’s stall without even giving Kevin a nod or saying hello. His face was white and tense. He went in a beeline toward the end stable and up the stairs to his quarters.

60

Kneeling before Brian Coffey’s dresser, Torrey was about to close the bottom drawer when she heard the footsteps on the stairs.

She’d been so absorbed she hadn’t heard the motorbike returning. Only now did she seem in retrospect to hear its racket.

Too late! He was on the stairs. She had an intuitive realization that the boylike, innocent face of Brian Coffey concealed something dangerous. Dangerous, why? At once she knew: Brian Coffey was living in fear. His fear was as sinister as a knife, as lethal as the bite of a cobra.

Helplessly she looked about. No way out but the door. She ran into the bathroom, almost tripping over her flapping mackintosh, and stepped into the tub. The shower curtain was skimpy; it did not quite close.

In the mirror above the sink she saw Brian Coffey’s reflection … saw him circle the room twice, walking jerkily, muttering to himself. Then abruptly he headed straight for the dresser, knelt down, and drew out that bottom drawer. He pushed aside his rat-pack collection and lifted a thick piece of newspaper that lined the bottom of the drawer. He drew something from beneath it, something flat, wrapped in a thin cloth.

At that instant, Kevin’s voice came from the stairs. “Mr. Coffey?”

With a swift movement, Brian Coffey slipped the cloth-wrapped object in his hand under his black jacket, forced the drawer closed, and stood up. The expression on his face was so threatening that Torrey felt it like an icicle sliding down her back. He was an animal at bay, teeth bared.

“Mr. Coffey?” Kevin, from the doorway, said, “I … I put the liniment on Black Pride’s foreleg … where the scratch from the fence was? But maybe you’d better look, I’m not sure…”

Brian Coffey gave a wild little laugh. “Ah, you’re always—! All right.” He pushed impatiently past Kevin, shaking his red head in disgust. “Come on, then.” He clattered down the stairs.

Torrey hardly breathed. Kevin stood looking around the room; his glance rested for a moment on the partly open bathroom door. For an instant Torrey fancied their eyes met. Then the lad turned and followed Brian down the stairs.

*   *   *

She was stiff with cold. For the last twenty minutes, since sneaking hurriedly from the stables, she’d been crouching on this wet stump in the woods, watching the stables. Waiting. Hoping. But she could be all wrong! It was just a guess.

She shivered. Her face was wet with the drizzling rain and her neck and wrists felt cold and clammy. She’d had no breakfast. She ached with hunger. The miserably wet weather made it worse. She imagined Winifred and Sheila and Luke Willinger at breakfast in the castle. Rose would have laid a fire in the grate in the breakfast room, a cheerful, warming fire. On the table would be hot biscuits and buttered scones, ham and rashers of bacon, lots of hot, fragrant coffee, and a pot of tea steaming on the—

There! Brian Coffey was crossing the stable yard. She went tense. He was heading toward the woods to her left. He wore his black bomber jacket and jeans and boots. He walked with a kind of single-minded purpose, his shoulders hunched against the drizzle. His red head was a dot of color in the bleak landscape of rain-darkened trees and gray skies. A red beacon.

The woods swallowed him.

Hunger forgotten, Torrey followed.

61

By nine o’clock Wednesday morning in Ballynagh, rain was falling and the sky was so darkly threatening that Sergeant Bryson turned on the wall lights in the garda station. Inspector O’Hare, arriving late, shrugged out of his wet raincoat. He had barely sat down when Sergeant Bryson smoothed out a crumpled bit of paper and laid it triumphantly on the desk before him.

“This message, sir. I found it in a wastebasket of stuff from Ms. Tunet’s bedroom at Castle Moore. Someone’s been pressuring her for money. Forty thousand dollars.”

Inspector O’Hare put on his half-glasses and read the wrinkled note. He looked up over the rims of the glasses at Bryson. “The Moore heirloom necklace must be worth forty thousand.”

“For sure, sir.”

O’Hare rubbed his chin. The fax he’d received from North Hawk regarding Ms. Tunet, past and present, had indicated her current account in the North Hawk Savings Bank was eight hundred dollars. Never mind the other revelation about the young woman’s moral character. A pity. “Desperate measures,” he said softly. “Murder.”

He glanced down at the crumpled paper, the schoolgirlish scrawl. “Who took the message?”

“Rose … Rose Burns, a maid at the castle. I questioned her. She said it was from Boston. A woman’s voice.”

Inspector O’Hare looked out at the rain. Never mind that he had awakened to miserable weather. He’d enjoyed a hearty breakfast of blood pudding, eggs, brown soda bread with honey, and strong black tea. He had also basked in the knowledge that the Lars Kasvi murder was solved.

Next on his agenda: the murder of Desmond Moore.

And now this message falling into his hands. Serendipitous. And yet … O’Hare felt a flicker of regret. Something about Ms. Tunet touched him, something clean and courageous, an untarnished something. Untarnished! That was a joke … considering this phone message alone. Rain pounded the window; he thought how it was raining on the hills and in the glens, and on the craggy wild mountains of Wicklow. A very sad rain, a rain like a shroud.

At his elbow, Sergeant Bryson said, “About the Lars Kasvi murder—I suppose the
Garda Siochana
will call this morning, confirming that the bloodstains on Desmond Moore’s black-and-red-plaid horse blanket were Mr. Kasvi’s?”

“I expect so.”

62

In the woods, rain dripped. Under Torrey’s wet brogues, the ground was soggy. But the dampness kept the twigs she stepped on from crackling. Still, she stayed well back from Brian Coffey. He was walking purposefully, unwaveringly, as though on an habitual path.

The woods thickened, then thinned. She heard voices, the clink of horses’ hooves on an occasional stone, the jingle of a bridle. Through the trees she saw two riders, a man and a woman in yellow rubber ponchos single-filing their horses; they went on and disappeared into the mist. That must be the bridle path, Torrey realized. Ahead, Brian Coffey crossed the path. A few feet farther, he vanished.